Shane Blay is a guitarist/vocalist for the indie band, Oh, Sleeper. The Texas based group has been compared to Slipknot and Underoath. You can learn more about the band here. Follow the band on Twitter @weareohsleeper.

For the past five years my brothers in Oh, Sleeper and myself have sacrificed our lives, our time, relationships, birthdays, holidays, health (haha) to travel around and play shows for our fans. Not to say that isn’t been a fun ride!

I would just like to bring a few things to our fans attention.

I would like to show you guys an average day in finances for a “mid-level” band like us. I’m going to breakdown the average monetary ins and outs of a day on tour.

On tour, bands have two ways to make money – guarantees and merchandise.

Reports are a brewin’ about  a new “social network” called Google Me after a tweet was posted by Digg’s Kevin Rose. That’s right, Facebook, you allegedly have a competitor being released into the social media realm soon.

It brings me to ask questions about the upcoming social network…

Will it be artist friendly? Is there going to be a music player for bands and artists? Are they going to take aspects of Myspace to help the cause?

Shaant Hacikyan, the founding member of Cute Is What We Aim For, will be hosting a live chat on Livestream on Wed, May 12 at 6:30pm ET before his headlining show at Highline Ballroom in NYC. To chat with Shaant, click on the link here.

CIWWAF kicks off a headlining tour with The Friday Night Boys, The Bigger Lights and Down With Webster today in Boston.

The band formed in January 2005 and in less than a year they were signed to Fueled by Ramen. The band’s 2006 debut The Same Old Blood Rush With A New Touch, produced by Matt Squire, spent countless months on the Billboard Top 200 Charts.

BandCentral.com officially launched today, offering bands a suite of essential tools that will enable them to take control of their music careers. With BandCentral, artists, managers and labels can organize all the vital business aspects of band life – everything from tours and fan databases, to merchandise and money – enabling them to develop and sustain successful careers.

BandCentral is already being used by thousands of bands, labels and managers, worldwide and changing the way they work for the better.

“There’s real potential here for BandCentral to change the way artists take control of their careers, and I’m certainly keen to see how labels and artists get to grips with it,” said Darren Hemmings, Digital Marketing Manager at PIAS.

Do you want a successful, stable and rewarding music career? Would you like to know exactly what record companies, producers, and management companies are looking for when seeking out new artists?

There are many great musicians who are not able to build a successful music career because they do not know what it is these companies want from them. As a result, many struggle and wonder why they are unable to “make it” even though they may be incredible musicians with great songs. What usually happens is that people start to believe the common myth about luck. They believe that you need to “get lucky” in order to “make it”. The result is that most musicians give up on their dreams and get a normal (non music related) day job.

Because you are reading this article, I can imagine that you have probably faced similar challenges. I know how you feel, because I went through the same depressing struggle for years and have seen hundreds of great musicians travel along the same path. But over time, I have discovered that in many cases the lack of success is caused by the musicians (including myself in the past) simply not knowing what it is the music business companies want from new artists.

You’ve just come together as a band and you’re ready to gig. But when you approach clubs to play they want to know where you’ve played in their market before and what kind of draw you usually bring. (Draw means how many paying fans usually come to one of your shows.)

If you’re a new band then your answer would be “we haven’t played before so we don’t really know how many paying fans will come.” And you know what will happen with that answer. They’ll tell you to come back when you have a fan base.

You’re thinking, “Yeah, but we’re such a great band your customers will love us.” The reality is clubsdon’t have customers, bands have customers. People go to a certain club to see a certain band. They don’t go to the Club X instead of Club Y because of the club; they go there because of the band that will be playing.

Before the days of internet – becoming a successful songwriter depended on a whole different set of factors. For example, as a non-performing songwriter, you would have needed to go out and find an artist or band willing to record your song, or have a music publisher get a cover for you.

As a performing artist, you would at least have had a vehicle for your songs subject of course to whether you or your band had a record deal.

A great deal of the “ifs and buts” of success would have depended not just on the commercial potential of your song, but on who was out there promoting for you, and how much marketing power your music publisher or record company (if you were an artist), had. Of course, much of that still applies today. So why has the internet had such an enormous impact on song writing, commercial recordings and tons of other commodities? I can tell you. Two things: digital, and distribution.

…and a few real boners thrown in for good measure…

Music and video – was there ever a better match made and sent down to us from rock ‘n roll Mount Olympus? The answer was no, until the music video contest came along. Now we’re talkin’ serious chem lab explosions. And how about music video contests run by musicians? Welcome to metameme ground zero.

Of course, there’s nothing new about a band or an artist running a contest as a promotional tool, but a music video contest is special (like your cousin Muley) because it’s a self-perpetuating promotional machine that’s easy to use and everybody wins:

• The musician hosting the contest wins by generating buzz.
• Entrants win because they’re musicians or indie filmmakers who are also generating buzz by entering the contest.
• The winner wins a prize and exposure for their own art.
• And the hosting musician wins again because she just got a bunch of people to promote her music for free!

There are many different ways to run a music video contest. Let’s take a look at a few going on today to see how the pros are doing it:

Ingrid Michaelson

Indie-pop-singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson is currently in the voting phase of a contest she ran in promotion of her new album, Everybody. She asked her fans to submit videos of themselves performing the album’s title track. She then pared the submissions down to ten surprisingly talent-laden entries, and now fans can vote for their favorites on her website. To further sweeten the pot, everybody who votes gets a free download of the original song.

When people ask me what Google Buzz is, I simply say it’s a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter. You apply live updates to your profile for your followers, similar to Twitter, and then add links or photos. You also have the ability to make your updates public or private.

Why should indie bands or artists use Google Buzz?

It is another excellent way to gain exposure for your band or project. You can apply custom links and have your profile showcased during Google searches of your project’s name.

Having a link back to your Web site is a solid reason to create a Google profile. Google also gives you the ability to add multiple links to your other social media sites, store, blog, etc. For instance, I currently have five links on my profile to the sites I want my followers to visit.

We recently caught up with Dave Kusek, author of The Future of Music, to talk about his latest project, Music Power Network.

Q) You had received a lot of requests to follow up The Future of Music with another book. What makes your service, Music Power Network, a better response?

A) Music Power Network (MPN) is a dynamic, interactive service. It can be constantly updated on a weekly basis. Rather than just reading a bunch of static information with no specific action steps, MPN provides applicable tools for each and every situation. Whether you have a band, label, management company, publicity firm, or other music business, MPN provides templates and other information that will specifically cater to your needs.

Q) As the large record labels become less significant each day, artists are turning to the direct-to-fan model more and more. Were you afraid that this service would give bands too much power?

Name: RootMusic

Quick Pitch: RootMusic is all about making musicians’ professional lives better, be it through building software or building community.

Genius Idea: RootMusic’s debut product is called BandPage, and it makes MySpace-like band page features possible inside a Facebook fan page.

At present, Facebook fan pages are laid out in such a way that you can’t share your music with your fans while letting them continue to browse for information. You can deploy a music player tab, but as soon as your fans click on the Photos tab to see pictures of your band, the music stops.

Indie music can now be submitted to the Rock Band Network store.

Rock Band Network will now permit independent and unsigned bands to submit their own songs for users to download. This offer is  for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game with the intention of providing the most downloadable tracks to Nintendo’s Wii moving forward.

Indie bands can price their songs between 50 cents and $3, netting 30% of track sales. Users of the game will be able to preview songs before they purchase on the Rock Band Network store.

A set of professional tools, which will allow musicians on the front line of writing and recording songs to completely control their destiny. It will take 20-40 hours for first-time users to apply their music on the full-featured editing suite. Bands will also have admission to interactive products and then giving them direct access to the download store.